


In the Spider's Embrace

by alikuu



Category: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Video Games), TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Blood and Gore, Child Abuse, Dark Fairytale, F/M, Shadow of Mordor verse, Spiders, murders, origin story of sorts, sads, sexy Shelob
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 12:27:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16475555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alikuu/pseuds/alikuu
Summary: The spooky origin story of sorts... Written for Halloween!





	In the Spider's Embrace

_The people of Nurnen have stories that are a thousand years old. Some were told long before we inhabited the land along the sea’s misty shores. Among the stories my grandfather used to tell, this one scared me the most when I was a child. I will tell it to you, my dear daughter, as best as I can remember it now, so that its moral remains unforgotten…_

Long ago, there was a thriving fortress of the men of Gondor, know as Minas Ithil. It was surrounded by many smaller settlements and farmlands, as well as an old forest where only the bravest hunters ever went. In one small village lived a Captain of the Steward of Minas Ithil. He was a veteran of many battles, and he loved his wife more than anything else in the world. When his wife died giving birth to their firstborn son, something tore in the old soldier’s heart and he was never the same again. He took up the bottle, and although he had been respected and wealthy all his life, soon his fortune begun to dissolve under the weight of his drinking. His boy grew up lonely and isolated without a mother’s care, without many friends, and with his father’s unfair disdain and beatings.

One day, after a particularly bad beating, the boy decided to run away and he did - sobbing his way to the lurking forest that outlined the fields where men laboured during the day. It was there that am old hunter found him and brought him back with a stern warning against ever attempting such reckless deeds again.

"Take better care of your son," the hunter told his father. "We both know the woods are no place for a child. Wolves and bears, and worse things hunt there."

To the boy he said, "Forget what you saw and live on your life."

"I don’t have a life," the child said. "Nobody loves me."

"That’s up to you to change," the old hunter told him and left.

From that day the boy grew even more quiet and contemplative, his eyes always looking to something very far away. However as the years passed, he seemed to take the old hunter’s advice to heart and he soon grew into a handsome, capable youth. Sadly no matter how smart and hardworking the youth become, he could never work hard enough to pay off his drunken father’s many debts or ease his father's hatred for himself. 

One night the drunken captain came back from a night of gambling, looking even more furious with his son than usual. Without even saying anything he slapped the back of the boy’s head with his large, calloused hand and started barking orders. On the next day his son had to walk to Minas Ithil, carrying his old armour and his sword. Those were preciously made, and guilded with real gold - the last valuables that the family had left - and he was to sell them in the market and return with the money to pay off a debt.

“If I don’t return the money they will take a piece of my skin as large as parchment to write on,” the old soldier said to his son, while pulling his ear to make him listen. “If you fail at this, I’m going to take that skin from your back!”

The boy knew that his father would make good on those words, so he packed the armour and at first light the next morning he set out on the long road to Minas Ithil.

It was a full day’s journey to go there, and another to come back, but the boy knew better than to take food with him, as it would only give his father another reason to beat him. So at midday he stopped by the road, unloaded the armour and begun scavenging by the road for late autumn fruits and berries, never straying too far into the underbrush. As luck would have it, a band of street performers stopped by the road for their midday meal as well and when they saw the handsome young man, scurrying about like a squirrel, they laughed and invited him to share their meagre lunch. The boy accepted gratefully, and enjoyed the meal as if it were a feast, since rarely had anyone been kind enough to him to offer him anything for free.

Amongst the troopers was a girl - she was young and beautiful and the boy’s eyes could hardly look away from her. She noticed and smiled, and when it was time for them to go their separate ways, the youth begged the troopers to take him along.

“I am alone in the world,” he said to the street performers. “Please, take me along! I am sure I can be useful.”

“What can you do,” the group asked him, since each one of them could perform a different trick - some could sing, some could dance, others juggle…

The boy could do neither of those things, but he could cook, cut wood, carry heavy loads, saddle horses and many other mundane tasks.

The troopers looked him up and down thoughtfully. Collectively they had good hearts, but their leader, who was also the father of the young girl, had a love only for gold, and he eyed the decorated armour that the boy carried with hungry eyes.

“Each new trooper is a burden before they find their craft in our group,” he declared. “We’d need a small… contribution.”

The boy understood immediately and readily agreed to come back with the money from his father’s armour and sword and join the troupe with that as his contribution. The troopers agreed to camp by the road for a night and a day, and wait for him to return from the markets. And so, the boy hurried down the road with renewed vigour, a hope for happiness and a good life, of the likes he had never had before.

All the way to the city he thought about the beautiful trooper girl and the smiles she had given to him. When he haggled with merchants for a higher price for his load, he had her in mind, and with the extra money he got, he bought her a simple necklace of blue glass beads. On the way back from the city, he all but skipped with joy and by midday on the next day he had returned to the place where the troopers were indeed still waiting.

“I brought you the money,” he announced cheerfully, but before he had time to even bring out his purse, someone hit him from behind and he fell unconscious.

The young man awoke later that evening with a painful bump on the back of his head, stripped of his cloak and all his money and every single possession. Then he realised that he had been robbed and the hopelessness of his situation, but he didn’t weep because in his life, he had come to expect misfortune and disappointment.

“It’s nothing more than I deserve”, he thought to himself. “My father would be right to skin me,” but the thought wasn't as resigned as usual, because if he wished for anything, it was that he didn’t die at the hands of his cruel father. 

He looked around the dimming light by the forest’s edge and remembered a memory as old and bleary as a long forgotten dream. There was a Lady who walked in the deepest shadows of the woods. Her hair was darker than dreamless sleep, her eyes were pale and green like poison, her feet were pale and soundless like moonlight against the murky floor of fallen leaves. He remembered her as the Lady he had met as a child, wondering the woods, sad, lonely and too afraid to go home. She had invited him into her house with a smile and a ready embrace. She had told him that in her heart there was a place for unwanted little boys, who wondered alone into the woods. She had shown him visions of her cozy little home, where he sat beside her on a table laden with steaming, cooked food, and she smiled like a mother down at him, as he ate and ate, as much as he wanted. He had been so hungry then...

And then the hunter had come, with his dog, and its barking scared her away. Her trail of spider webs had been easy to follow, but he hadn't dared.

The hunter had found him and shaken him, bringing him out of the forest and away from the gossamer threads.

“It’s was no Lady you saw, but the Spider,” the hunter had said. “She whispers in the ears of those who venture too far into her woods. There is nothing for you but death at the end of her spider’s web.”

Now the boy had grown too old to wish for a mother, but he wished for a woman, and the Lady had been fair beyond all measure. He longed to look upon her beauty one more time, no matter the price.

“Better her, than my father,” he thought in his despair, and feeling that he had nothing left to lose, headed straight into the forest.

It was towards the end of the year, cold, with looming dark clouds swallowing the last pale rays of the setting sun. The trees were bare and the forest floor whispered with the voices of dead leaves as the youth threaded through them. He could see nor hear no birds or beasts, and the forest was quiet, as if holding its breath as he burned his way into its cold debts like a single candle, raging against the night.

It wasn’t long before he begun to see spider webs between the trees, and many small figures scurrying below the dry foliage of fallen tree carcases. The light was scant and soon the world would turn completely black. Unsure if he’d find his way, the young man begun to call:

“Lady of the Trees, o Lady of the Forest. Come out, come out! I know you’re here.”

A voice answered him soon enough, like a whisper near his ear.

“Why have you come, lost boy? Didn’t you reject my hospitality years ago? Didn’t you turn your back on me? Not many do. What do you seek from me now?”

“I have come back to you,” the young man called, his voice jostling the emptiness between the leafless trees. "I want you to take me to your house."

“Have you understood that you are meant for me,” the Lady of the Forest stepped from behind an ancient tree, barefoot and clad in a dress of the darkest shadow, just as the youth remembered her.

Once he saw her, he realised that she was beautiful and deadly as nightshade, and in his heart a desperate fire lit up and he wanted her, recklessly and hopelessly as only a doomed man could want another.

“You must know then, that even as you tarry on his errand, your father sharpens his knife for your return,” the Lady continued. “My children bring me many news and they tell me he’d rather keep the money he sent you to bring, and pay off the debt with your skin.”

The boy didn’t know if it she was telling him truths or lies, but it barely mattered. He had lost the money and returning without it would end up as she predicted it anyway.

“Yes," he whispered. "Please, take me to your house as you once promised. I don’t ever want to go back home again.”

But the Spider was wary. It wasn’t often that her victims escaped and then came back. And the boy had grown into a handsome young man, with arms strengthened from long hours of hard labor, chopping wood and carrying loads, to make due for his father’s gambling and drinking. She eyed him suspiciously, uncertain if this wasn’t a trap, so she asked again:

“But you know what awaits you in my house; the hunter told you who I am. Why do you wish to come with me?”

“There’s nothing for me in this world,” the boy said, stepping closer to the ghostly figure among the trees. “No one would mourn my loss, because I’m dear to no one. You could love me, if just for a bit, couldn't you? Just for once - I'd trade you my life for that.”

“That is not how it goes, my little fly,” the Spider frowned, but she beckoned for him to follow her as she lead the way further into the woods. “But I can be gentle, I will put you to sleep. You won’t have to suffer ever again.”

“I suppose that’s good enough for me,” the young man agreed and followed her into the darkness. But as he took a step behind her, he turned his head to look longingly to the fading light, somewhere far back where the forest ended.

Suddenly the Lady’s hand cupped his cheek and she gently guided his head around, standing close enough for him to touch.

“Don’t look back,” she said. “Look only at me now.”

The Spider’s mouth was red, not like a rose, but like a bruise, and when she smiled the pearly teeth that glistened behind her lips were too many and too sharp. Spiderwebs glinted in the trees around her, and black spiders, as big as a human’s palm flitted around her pale feet. Her skin was as white as the moon on a winter night - the kind of skin that had never ever seen the light. There was hunger in her poisonous green eyes, but the boy could think of nothing but her long bare arms, closing around him in a sweet embrace, her soft mouth whispering sweet promises into his ear, just aa she had when he had been a child caught in her web.

Thoughtlessly he followed her further into the forest, all the while the spider webs between the trees grew ever denser and the darkness ever starker. Soon he could see nothing but the pale lines of the Lady’s spine, revealed suggestively by her low-back dress.

But the Spider was still wary not to lose her price. She was used to hunting children and small game - she never risked ensnaring victims large enough to put up a fight. So, when she felt the young man growing anxious and uncertain, his heartbeat drumming a fast rythm in his chest and his breaths coming short, she paused to show him the dark canopy of the trees above them.

Thousands of gossamer spiderwebs trembled in the imperceivable breeze. Dewdrops caught in their silvery threads glistened like a treasure-trove of diamonds or a woodland sky, full of secret, hidden stars. The Spider watched as the youth looked up with equal measures of fear and awe. His face was handsome, his skin the only warm color in the wasteland around them, his eyes bright like the embers. She watched his throat blobbing as he swallowed, her eyes hungry on the pulsing veins in his neck. She was taking him to her cavern tunnels, delved into the ghostly mountains at the end of the dark forest. There she planned to put him to sleep with her poison and transform into her true, monstrous form of a gigantic spider, so she could hang him in her pantry and begin to slowly, oh so slowly, feast on his inner juices.

  
“Come,” she beckoned impatiantly. “It isn’t far now.”

But then the youth surprised her - when he looked down from the glittering webs back to her moonlight-pale visage, he grabbed the spider Lady's slight human frame and pulled her into a kiss.

“You are bold,” the Spider said when he released her. “I don’t think I’ve ever been kissed by a human before. But I told you before, you won't get love from me.”

“I know, but if you give me this, just once, then I will willingly go to what follows. I need this to happen just once, because I was never loved before. If you give me this, then I won’t struggle - I will let you eat me.”

The Spider looked at the young man considering, and she appreciated that he was handsome and strong, and she thought of how long it had been since she had mated - her brood was weaker and smaller for being fatherless for so long. With a mate, her children were going to grow smarter and fiercer, able to better serve her and bring terror into the hearts of the villagers near her forest.

“Your offer intrigues me,” she said. “It shows respect for the Spider’s ways, because that is our way - the male lives to mate just once and then becomes food for the female, so she can spawn a strong brood.”

The young man looked at her with hungry, hopeful eyes. Despite his obvious desperation, still wary of a trap, she asked:

“But I still don’t know why you came back to me at all. Aren’t you afraid of any of this? Doesn’t the darkness frighten you?”

“The darkness scares me,” he answered. “The ugly darkness of my father’s corruption, of people’s deception and lies. Your darkness - it’s natural, it’s beautiful.”

He looked up at the spiderwebs around them and then back to her.

“Your darkness is irreprochable - it’s the way it’s meant to be. I don’t mind getting lost in this darkness, to avoid the one that awaits me if I were to return.”

Those words pleased and flattered the Spider and she gladly took the young man into her embrace and loved him as truly as she could. Later when they were done, lying on the shadowy ground, amongst dead leaves and sticky spiderwebs, their bodies interwined, one hot as a summer’s day, the other as cold as death itself, the Spider Lady smiled and twined her long, long fingers through the youth’s dark locks adoringly, hungrily thinking of asking him to fulfil his end of the deal and let her eat him without struggle, right there in the forest where they laid.

However just as you would have it, a distant web tingled and the spider’s head snapped up aleart.

“It seems that Luck hasn’t forgotten you after all,” she told her young lover.

She lead him through the forest to a place where a young buck had become caught in her webs. The animal struggled helplessly against its sticky prison, each movement getting him further caught in the spider’s web.

“We will eat him instead of you, then we will mate again, and then we will see,” she decided and the young man agreed eagerly.

The Spider Lady tore the animal apart with her knife-like nails and teeth, and she offered the heart to her lover, who took it and bit into it’s bloody pulp. The boy ate with a hunger, the likes of which he had never known before, and the more he ate, the hungrier he got.

The Spider watched appreciatively as red blood ran down her young lover’s chin, and gladly laid the boy down again. The second time she was even more satisfied, because she felt that with his seed, she’d spawn a brood more vile and vicious than she had had in centuries. She was so impressed that she told the boy that he could leave, if he promised to return and sire more of her brood later.

“But I cannot go back,” the boy protested. “Please, let me stay here with you!”

“That’s not an option,” the Spider said. “I need to lay my eggs and tent to them, and when the younglings hatch, if you’re around, not even I would be able to stop them from swarning you.”

“What then should I do,” the youth bemoaned hopelessly. “Perhaps it’s better if you eat me after all. I don’t want my father to skin my back.”

“Are you still afraid of that?” The Spider laughed. “He will be able to do no such thing, not with the gift I am going to give you.”

Then the Spider Lady sunk her all-too-sharp teeth into the young man’s throat, filling his bloodstream with poison and dark magic.

“From now on your flesh will burn like nettle, and your blood will erode like acid,” she told him, and content with such gifts, the youth left her forest and returned to his home in the village.

His father awaited him, and when he heard that he had lost the money, he reached to hit him, but as soon as his hand slapped the young man’s cheek, it burned as if stung by the vilest nettle. Then the old soldier grabbed the young man by the clothes, took the knife and tried to cut the skin from his back, but the first drop of blood that touched the old man’s fingers, made the flesh hiss and spit, as if eaten by acid.

Raging with pain, the old man ran away, and soon the hand which had held the knife withered and dried off, leaving him maimed. What killed him, the infection or the debt-collectors, no one knows, because his body lays forgotten in some roadside ditch.

The young man delighted in his newfound freedom, but was satisfied only for a short while. He had tasted hunger of the likes he had never known before - the hunger of a creature that wants to eat, instead of being eaten. He begun to use the Spider’s gift to his gain and many were the evils he then did. He returned to his Spider lover’s embrace again and again, but he didn’t risk tempting fate again - he brought living offerings to sate her ever present hunger. His first gift was the trooper’s daughter - the same one that had smiled to him, whose father had fooled and robbed him. He found her sobbing one day:

“I am so glad you found me,” she said to him and threw herself in his handsome embrace. “I have been thinking of you since the day we met.”

“How strange, I have been doing just the same,” he said, and it wasn’t a lie.

“I am so sorry for what my father did to you,” she told him. “He’s an awful man! He’s promised me to an ugly old bastard, only to get to his hefty coin bag. I wish I could get back to him somehow.”

“We can have our revenge, right now, if you want,” he offered and carelessly agreed. 

He spirited her away and took her straight into the deep dark woods where the Spider dwelled.

“Are you sure this is the way,” she asked as he tugged her by the arm, further into the twilight, spiderwebs all around them.

Later he shared the girl's heart with the Spider Lady after they had lain together.

Every time he visited her, the Spider gave him more gifts, and he grew stronger and more sinister. Soon the whole village knew of his misdeeds, stealing daughters and sons to bring to the Spider, but no one was strong enough to kill him, so collectively they drove him away. Exposed for what he was, the young man left and went to another village where the cycle begun again, until he was driven away from there too.

By the time no village near the forest of the Spider would have him, the youth had grown into a fierce man, with a handsome face and cold, cold eyes. Driven from the land of his youth, he went further south and East to a place far from everything he knew. He no longer planned to return to his Spider lover - she had given him everything she could - instead he searched for new ways to satisfy the ever growing void inside his chest.

Finally he heard of a vicious warlock, by the name of Mairon, gathered an army to the east. He, who conquered the southern lands with machinery and dark magic, gathered beside him the cruelest men, who walked the earth. Mairon immediately recognised the touch of magic other than his own in the man’s body, and respected him for it. 

“I know of her - her magic is ancient, but not particularly potent," the warlock said to the ruthless man. "You were right to come to me. I will give you true power, and real purpose. Serve me well, and I will make you into my Black Hand that extends across all lands. All will tremble before you."

_And that is how a boy, who was once lost in the woods became the one known as the Black Hand. Take caution in this tale, my daughter. Not every port will welcome you in a storm. Not every kind deed is well-done. Don’t ever kick those, who are already down, because there is no knowing what monsters lurk beneath their flesh._


End file.
